The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

On Mars, the harsh climate could make any colonist turn to drugs to escape a dead-end existence. Especially when the drug is Can-D, which transports its users into the idyllic world of a Barbie-esque character named Perky Pat. When the mysterious Palmer Eldritch arrives with a new drug called Chew-Z, he offers a more addictive experience, one that might bring the user closer to God. But in a world where everyone is tripping, no promises can be taken at face value.

Martian Time-Slip

On an arid Mars, local bigwigs compete with Earth-bound interlopers to buy up land before the Un develops it and its value skyrockets. Martian Union leader Arnie Kott has an ace up his sleeve, though: an autistic boy named Manfred who seems to have the ability to see the future. In the hopes of gaining an advantage on a Martian real estate deal, powerful people force Manfred to send them into the future, where they can learn about development plans.

Ubik

Glen Runciter runs a lucrative business - deploying his teams of anti-psychics to corporate clients who want privacy and security from psychic spies. But when he and his top team are ambushed by a rival, he is gravely injured and placed in "half-life," a dreamlike state of suspended animation. Soon, though, the surviving members of the team begin experiencing some strange phenomena, such as Runciter's face appearing on coins and the world seeming to move backward in time.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

Jason Taverner - world-famous talk show host and man-about-town - wakes up one day to find that no one knows who he is - including the vast databases of the totalitarian government. And in a society where lack of identification is a crime, Taverner has no choice but to go on the run with a host of shady characters, including crooked cops and dealers of alien drugs. But do they know more than they are letting on? And just how can a person's identity be erased overnight?

Clans of the Alphane Moon

For years, the third moon in the Alphane system was used as a psychiatric hospital. But when war broke out between Earth and the Alphanes, the hospital was left unguarded and the inmates set up their own society, made up of competing factions based on their particular mental illnesses. When Earth sends a delegation to take back the colony, they find enclaves of depressives, schizophrenics, paranoiacs, and others uniting to repel what they see as a foreign invasion.

Now Wait for Last Year

Earth is trapped in the crossfire of an unwinnable war between two alien civilizations. Its leader is perpetually on the verge of death. And on top of that, a new drug has just entered circulation - a drug that haphazardly sends its users traveling through time. In an attempt to escape his doomed marriage, Dr. Eric Sweetscent becomes caught up in all of it. But he has questions: Is Earth on the right side of the war? Is he supposed to heal Earth's leader or keep him sick? And can he change the harrowing future that the drug has shown him?

The World Jones Made

Floyd Jones has always been able to see exactly one year into his future, a gift and curse that began one year before he was even born. As a fortuneteller at a post-apocalyptic carnival, Jones is a powerful force, and may be able to free society from its paralyzing Relativism. If, that is, he can avoid the radioactively unstable government hit man on his tail.

Blade Runner: Based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

It was January 2021, and Rick Deckard had a license to kill. Somewhere among the hordes of humans out there lurked several rogue androids. Deckard's assignment: find them and then..."retire" them. Trouble was, the androids all looked exactly like humans, and they didn't want to be found!

Eye in the Sky

When a routine tour of a particle accelerator goes awry, Jack Hamilton and the rest of his tour group find themselves in a world ruled by Old Testament morality, where the smallest infraction can bring about a plague of locusts. Escape from that world is not the end, though, as they plunge into a Communist dystopia and a world where everything is an enemy. Philip K. Dick was aggressively individualistic, and no worldview is safe from his acerbic and hilarious takedowns.

Lies, Inc.

When catastrophic overpopulation threatens Earth, one company offers to teleport citizens to Whale's Mouth, an allegedly pristine new home for happy and industrious émigrés. But there is one problem: the teleportation machine works in only one direction. When Rachmael ben Applebaum discovers that some of the footage of happy settlers may have been faked, he sets out on an 18-year journey to see if anyone wants to come back.

Valis

What is VALIS? This question is at the heart of Philip K. Dick's groundbreaking novel, the first book in his defining trilogy. When a beam of pink light begins giving a schizophrenic man named Horselover Fat (who just might also be known as Philip K. Dick) visions of an alternate Earth where the Roman Empire still reigns, he must decide whether he is crazy or whether a godlike entity is showing him the true nature of the world.

Volume I: The King of the Elves

The King of the Elves is the opening installment of a uniform, five-volume edition of The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, expanded from the previous Collected Stories set to incorporate new story notes, and two added tales, one previously unpublished, and one uncollected.

The City & The City

New York Times best-selling author China Mieville delivers his most accomplished novel yet, an existential thriller set in a city unlike any other, real or imagined. When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlof the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined.

The Man in the High Castle

It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some 20 years earlier the United States lost a war - and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan.

The Game-Players of Titan

Years ago, Earth and Titan fought a war and Earth lost. The planet was irradiated and most of the surviving population is sterile. The few survivors play an intricate and unending game called Bluff at the behest of the sluglike aliens who rule the planet. At stake in the game are two very important commodities: land and spouses. Pete Garden just lost his wife and Berkeley, California, but he has a plan to win them back. That is, if he isn't derailed by aliens, psychic traitors, or his new wife.

A Scanner Darkly

Substance D - otherwise known as Death - is the most dangerous drug ever to find its way on to the black market. It destroys the links between the brain's two hemispheres, leading first to disorentation and then to complete and irreversible brain damage. Bob Arctor, undercover narcotics agent, is trying to find a lead to the source of supply, but to pass as an addict he must become a user, and soon, without knowing what is happening to him, he is as dependent as any of the addicts he is monitoring.

The Penultimate Truth

In the future, most of humanity lives in massive underground bunkers, producing weapons for the nuclear war they've fled. Constantly bombarded by patriotic propaganda, the citizens of these industrial anthills believe they are waiting for the day when the war will be over and they can return above ground. But when Nick St. James, president of one anthill, makes an unauthorized trip to the surface, what he finds is more shocking than anything he could imagine.

The Sirens of Titan

The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course, there's a catch to the invitation...

The waters rose, submerging New York City. But the residents adapted, and it remained the bustling, vibrant metropolis it had always been. Though changed forever. Every street became a canal. Every skyscraper an island. Through the eyes of the varied inhabitants of one building, Kim Stanley Robinson shows us how one of our great cities will change with the rising tides. And how we, too, will change.

Dr. Bloodmoney

What happens after the bombs drop? This is the troubling question Philip K. Dick addresses with Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb. It is the story of a world reeling from the effects of nuclear annihilation and fallout, a world where mutated humans and animals are the norm, and the scattered survivors take comfort from a disc jockey endlessly circling the globe in a broken-down satellite.

Ringworld

Welcome to Ringworld, an intermediate step between Dyson Spheres and planets. The gravitational force created by a rotation on its axis of 770 miles per second means no need for a roof. Walls 1,000 miles high at each rim will let in the sun and prevent much air from escaping. Larry Niven's novel Ringworld is the winner of the 1970 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

The Complete Short Stories

A collection of 98 enthralling and pulse-quickening stories, spanning five decades, venerates the remarkable imagination of J. G. Ballard. With a body of work unparalleled in twentieth-century literature, J. G. Ballard is recognized as one of the greatest and most prophetic writers in the world. With the much-hailed release of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard, readers now have a means to celebrate the unmatched range and mesmerizing cadences of a literary genius.

The Cosmic Puppets

Following an inexplicable urge, Ted Barton returns to his idyllic Virginia hometown for a vacation, but when he gets there, he is shocked to discover that the town has utterly changed. The stores and houses are all different and he doesn't recognize anybody. The mystery deepens when he checks the town's historical records...and reads that he died nearly twenty years earlier.

The Simulacra

On a ravaged Earth, fate and circumstances bring together a disparate group of characters, including a fascist with dreams of a coup, a composer who plays his instrument with his mind, a First Lady who calls all the shots, and the world's last practicing therapist. And they all must contend with an underclass that is beginning to ask a few too many questions, aided by a man called Loony Luke and his very persuasive pet alien.

Publisher's Summary

Ragle Gumm has a unique job: Every day he wins a newspaper contest. And when he isn't consulting his charts and tables, he enjoys his life in a small town, in 1959. At least, that's what he thinks. But then strange things start happening. He finds a phone book where all the numbers have been disconnected, and a magazine article about a famous starlet named Marilyn Monroe, whom he's never heard of. Plus, everyday objects are beginning to disappear and are replaced by strips of paper with words written on them, like "bowl of flowers" and "soft-drink stand". When Ragle skips town to try to find the cause of these bizarre occurrences, his discovery could make him question everything he has ever known.

To hear one of PKD's earlier novels has been a great experience. His stories travel better through time than most of Heinlein's novels. At times I was reminded of 'The Manchurian Candidate' ( Richard Condon, 1959) and of the more recent CIA experiments in mind control. I was/am keen to again hear Heinlein's 'Moon is a Harsh Mistress' (that I do rank as one of my favouite stories) after listening to this.

Jeff Cummings' reading was good as were the ideas embedded in the story. The quest for the nature of reality and the nature of words in defining percieved reality is interesting at very least. ( Not a spoiler because that is not the story, just following through to his later works.)

For anyone new to PKD this is a mystery story set in a future written over 50 years ago, and not too hard to follow,

For me it was a great listen.

4 of 4 people found this review helpful

Darwin8u

Mesa, AZ, United States

13/06/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Mediocre Mother to Gravity's Rainbow and the Truman Show?"

A book that could have inspired both Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (anticipation of rockets) and the Truman Show (community set up around one man). While I give it points for anticipating a couple generations early the narcissism of the 21st century, the absurdity of American Exceptionalism, the shallow falseness of community on FB, etc., it was in the end just too damn slow. Most of the narrative was underwater. Not as kinetic or beautiful as his later stuff (read, it is sometimes boring). There was no rush. There were no prose daisies to pick as I picked through the pages. It was good just not great. It was PKD, just not great PKD

13 of 17 people found this review helpful

Kindle Customer

CARTHAGE, MO, United States

16/03/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Nice and Easy until Something Gives!"

Any additional comments?

The nice and easy fifties, families living their post war lives until one day something odd happens. Discover ever so slowly what is hidden and then hang on for the ride of a lifetime! <br/>I thoroughly enjoyed this book, even though it starts out very slow, almost boring. It is so worth it, because it intensifies the suspense that builds up slowly until suddenly everything falls apart and the reader sits at the edge of the seat until the last page!

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

catie

25/01/17

Overall

Performance

Story

"Satisfying"

Time Out of Joint is a great book. It's a reminiscent of the film Truman Show and the novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. PKD employs some of his usual tropes: constructed reality and government conspiracy, to build a gripping story about a man undergoing a Freudian regression. In this novel the 50's utopia, called "Old Town", is more quaint than creepy, but it's wrought with glitches and non sequiturs. The only reason I didn't give this book a 5 star rating is that it's a small scale read, with a limited world. That said, no questions are left unanswered and it's overall a very satisfying production:) Enjoy!

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Matthew

06/03/16

Overall

Performance

Story

"Sounds like its the basis of a lot of other storie"

Has a lot of star was tropes, but like usual with Dick this is their birth place.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

A. Sines

Denton, Texas United States

24/04/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"technically 3.5 stars for the story"

Any additional comments?

Master of the weird, Philip K. Dick takes us back to a 1958 world revolving around Ragle Gum, literally. Famous for continuously winning a newspaper contest and the subject of news himself, everyone seems to know him. However, as we read more, nothing is ever at it appears.<br/><br/>I appreciate this work as a classic from a twisted mind, but it is more predictable than most. The twist comes in the second half of the story as in the first half we are only given the background, the drawing of the picture of Mr. Gum’s life consumed by winning entries in the newspaper contest.<br/><br/>Where he becomes confused, so perhaps, do the readers, drawing conclusions, forming theories and reading just one more chapter to find the clues as to what is really going on.<br/><br/>Without spoilers, this is definitely from the mind of Mr. Philip K. Dick.<br/>

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Cletus949

LOS ANGELES, CA, United States

04/04/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Good Dick, PK"

First experience with Dick, PK. I was as lost as Gumm at first, turned out to be... Out there, in a good way.

The narrator did a great job of making most of the characters sound annoying, esp the woman and children. At first I hated, but I ended up thinking that the annoying voices added to Gumm's psychosis.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Whit Gurley

Portland, OR

16/01/13

Overall

Performance

Story

"Couldn't get past the narrator..."

What did you like about the performance? What did you dislike?

Maybe it's my relative inexperience with audiobooks, but the varying voices in the narration felt corny and grating. I listened to all of fifteen minutes before I had to stop. I found it so distracting that I really can't vouch for the story itself at all - I'm merely assigning a best guess based on my knowledge of the author and appreciation of the genre. Caveat emptor.

0 of 3 people found this review helpful

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